Talk for Wiki Project "Analysis of News Sources"

Talk about this Project

It makes no sense to just say “left” or “right” like in the first link given here.
There are good discussions (don’t find the link right now), that the good old left-right-thing should become at least 2-dimensional when speaking of political opinions:
– dimension of state vs citizen (how much does the state control the citizen?): Like Anarchy vs. Stalinism.
– dimension of money (private-owned ok?): Like Capitalism vs. Stalinism again.
Left or right makes no sense in the 21st century.
Not only philosophically, but also from a discussive point of view: Rights hate Lefts and vice versa. But if you have a position in a 2-dimensional space, it’s much more difficult to hate your (geographical) neighbour, because you have more in common with them than in the 1-dimensional left-right world.
So let’s make life more exciting and friendly 🙂
PS: Definitely more dimensions possible, and maybe I misunderstood the 2-dimensional model. When I think about what I wrote, something is wrong here… But anyhow, in order to avoid stupid hatred (and in order to inform people correctly) more dimensions than just plain old left-right shit are desirable.

Ok, I admit I was too lazy to thoroughly search. The 2-dimensional model is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_compass and it’s very roughly what I described above. And I repeat: It’s much more difficult for a .3/.8 authoritarian left to say to a .7/.5 libertarian right that they are stupid assholes than for rights to the lefts – and vice versa, and for all dimensions.

I think this article needs a more descriptive title to differentiate it from the list of official trusted news sources. Maybe “Political Lean of Popular News Sources” or “Determining Potential Bias in News Sources.”

Hi guys – we’re doing a ‘What we’ve been reading/liked’ in 2017 and this seems like the sort of thing you’d be interested in adding to. It’s not quite the same but it is a highlight of good-quality media.

The company is now named “Groupe Le Monde” .
The Groupe is controlled by the “Le Monde libre” Company with 64 % of the capital.
This company is itself controllerd at 85 % by bûsinessmen Xavier Niel and Matthieu Pigasse (Previously with Pierre Bergé, dead in 2017), and by 15 % By Spanish newspaper editor Prisa (Share holder of El País newspaper)
Source: Wikipedia in French.

Reading the TALK and some of the entries I have taken the liberty to make the primary category of this PROJECT “MEDIA”
It may also be valuable for participants to have access to some of the most current and well-researched analyses in this area, particularly as they try to tackle current media habits of consumers, some tropes around “filter bubbles” and also whether “fake news” is in the eye of the beholder or better described as deliberately misleading information, or misinformation.
– Information Disorder: Toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policy making, is a slightly academic but very comprehensive look at how to look at misinformation, bad journalism and deliberate disinformation. It is published by the First Draft group which is supported by a range of media groups, platforms and non-profit groups and is affiliated with the Shorenstein Center at Harvard: https://firstdraftnews.com/resource/coe-report/
– The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University publishes this annual survey of trends in digital news consumption.http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/
Let me know if you feel TALK is the best place for this material or in the MEDIA SOURCES PROJECT itself.

Authoritative sources of information about media bias:
I appreciate the discussion about media bias and wonder if it might be worthwhile to create a section on the News Sources project page that describes the authorities behind the determinations of ideological or political bias of the various news sources. As a nurse, I am not as familiar with these ratings as journalists, so only offer the following for consideration.

Dave Z. and Eduardo C. started this train of thought for me with a useful discussion about mediabiasfactcheck.com. University libraries, and particularly university libraries that have a well – recognized school of journalism seem a good place to start determining reputable authorities. I asked a group of librarians for recommendations and the following resources were suggested, as a start.

After determining the authoritative sources that are acceptable for WikiTribune journalism, maybe we could find, or create, an ideological/political bias chart that includes each news source on the project page, and that all the WikiTribune journalists and management find acceptable. Such a chart might be a way for readers to quickly grasp the perspective of each source and its relative position on the ideological/political scale.

That makes sense. Do you think building that list for a bigger market like NYC first would be a good idea and then branching out or simply starting lists for different regions/states/countries that way people can know where there is an information hole and that it needs to be filled?

Speaking only for myself, I can see this being a hierarchy – a main page with sub-pages, so people can drill down to find what they want – and we can have a fairly large number of nearly blank pages at first, which people can fill in as they do research or if they know something about a particular locality.

Say, for example, Buffalo, New York – I know very little about the media environment there, but presumably lots of people do know, or if I had the time to research I could do a passable job of presenting each of the local outlets.

mediabiasfactcheck.com goes through and identifies how factual a source is and then labels its leaning. Might be a good starting point. I don’t recall the methodology, but I think I remember seeing one. The political ideological leaning might be survey-based, which with enough people might be fairly indicative how it’s actually leaning.

That’s awesome! I’m looking into it… The methodology is explained here: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/methodology/ The survey seems to be just an extra, and they do their own research based on very interesting points like “Bias by Omission”, “Bias by Labeling”,…

This is laughably bad, they have CNN and the like as “left bias”. You would be hard pressed to find a single main stream media outlet that is even centre left, let alone left, they’re all capitalist through and through. CNN is in the same category with Marxist, and other actual socialist and communist news outlets for christ sake.

Putting their biases on a left/right spectrum is just plain silly. There could be an outlet that is socially left and economically right or vice versa. Their one plane spectrum wouldn’t be able to show us that.

It’s more of a way to generally understand the bias. I agree there should be an economic and a political spectrum. But many sources that lean one way in economic categories tend to lean the same way in political areas.

Economic could be a spectrum from socialism (left) to capitalism (right) and the political spectrum could be democratic (left) to autocratic (right). The problems are that in the US and the rest of the world left and right has different connotations and definitions. There needs to be specific definitions to make sure everything is standardized. The spectrums need to be standard global definitions not country- or culture-specific.

However, in the US, at least in mainstream politics, CNN is very much center left. Anarchists, communists, socialists etc would disagree of course. From my understanding they would consider CNN and the Democrat party to be liberals (meaning center right) while they would consider themselves leftists.

This plays into what you’re talking about though and I believe how WT decides on what words mean is important. Those words also mean different things in different countries and often mean different things to different groups even within the same country.

I would argue that CNN is center left but I think it’s important that everyone have a conversation about this and we need to decide how we want to define words like “liberal” and “conservative” and what exactly we mean when we write that a publication is “center-left”.

It would be my pleasure to add information about the US newspapers. I have a potential conflict of interest for The Washington Post (TWP or WaPo), in that I served as a nurse there for several years. I did not write nor edit articles, nor in any other way contribute to the news other than in my health and safety capacity. Please tell me whether this constitutes a conflict of interest sufficient to not contribute information about TWP? Thank you in advance for considering my request.

I think, so long as you weren’t a journalists or otherwise involved in the editorial side of TWP you should be fine *so long* as everything is backed up with references. Thanks for letting everyone know on the talk as that really helps. The new NYT section is actually a pretty darn good example.

Hmmm, I’m going to add to this again as I’m looking at it. I feel like the ‘leaning’ should be referenced as otherwise it’s a value judgement. I’m not sure _how_ you would make that determination in a well-sourced manner but again, I think that’s something to go in the guidelines.

Other point – what do you think the criteria is going to be for ‘controversies’? I can easily see people trying to slip their own biases into that one.

Example controversy #1 – taking money for non-neutral coverage without disclosure – that’s good neutral coverage of a scummy tactic
Example controversy #2 – they said mean things about someone I like and that made us all mad at them

I think we can all tell the difference between the two but you’ll probably want that in your guidelines.

WikiTribuneWikiTribuneOpen menuCloseSearchLikeBackNextOpen menuClose menuPlay videoRSS FeedShare on FacebookShare on TwitterShare on RedditFollow us on InstagramFollow us on YoutubeConnect with us on LinkedinEmail us